Despite the fact that the phrase “anarchist conference” seems like the punchline to a joke, anarchist gatherings and conferences are sites of learning, identity formation, and networking. These events build that “new world in the shell of the old.” How and what they build changes through time and space. This presentation will examine the programs of anarchist gatherings since 1988 in order to map the shifting strategies and frameworks of contemporary anarchist movements.

Lesley Wood is interested in how ideas travel, how power operates, how institutions change, how conversations influence practices, how people resist and how conflict starts, transforms and ends. She is an Associate Professor of Sociology of Sociology at York University. Her first anarchist gathering was Without Borders in San Francisco in 1989. She helped to organize Anarchy in the UK (1994) and Active Resistance (1998) as well as anarchist bookfairs in Toronto in the late 2000s.

This City Talk was co-sponsored by the Erasmus+ programme of the European Union through the Jean Monnet EU Centre of Excellence at the University of Victoria.